Seeing Where George Eliot Came From

Griff House, George Eliot’s childhood home, in which she lived from infancy until she was twenty-two, looks much as it did in the early nineteenth century, at least if you approach it from the front: there is a handsome Georgian façade, a steep slate roof, and well-proportioned windows that give on to a wide lawn edged with trees. If you try to ignore the roar of the nearby highway—not altogether an easy feat—it’s possible to imagine the house as it was when occupied by the young Mary Ann Evans, whose father, Robert Evans, was the estate manager for a the local landowner, to whom Griff belonged.

Approached from any other angle, however, Griff tells a different story. A few years ago the house, which is near the town of Nuneaton, was acquired by Whitbread, the British hospitality company. Whitbread appended a sprawling hotel to its rear, moated it about with parking lots, and converted the old farmhouse into a lively surf-and-turf pub. (The hotel’s Web site makes no mention of George Eliot.) There’s a large flat-screen TV in the parlor above the fireplace, a pool table in what was once the Evans’s dining room, and lurid slot machines on the flagstones of the entrance hall. Whitbread hasn’t entirely ignored its property’s illustrious former inhabitant: a sign notes that George Eliot lived there. But neither does the company have the instincts or inclinations for preservation. Pending final planning permission, Whitbread hopes to demolish a number of the outbuildings that still stand around Griff, where the work of the farm took place.

These structures, where the household’s butter was made and the chickens were kept, don’t look like much: they are currently in a state of considerable disrepair, with sagging roofs and deliquescent brickwork. But as Kathryn Hughes, one of George Eliot’s biographers, argues in the Guardian this week, these humble farm buildings are where Mary Ann Evans learned first-hand the rural lives and ways that informed her fiction. The George Eliot Fellowship, about which I wrote in the magazine, and of which Hughes is a vice-president, is campaigning to save the buildings.

Visiting a writer’s one-time home is a mixed endeavor. There are those houses, like Griff, which have been transformed to an almost ludicrous extent in their new incarnation. (I admit, though, that it’s pleasant to be able to have a beer on a summer’s evening while sitting on George Eliot’s front lawn.) Meanwhile, houses that are preserved as reverent shrines to the genius that once lurked within—with books left open on a leather-topped desk, bathed in green-shaded lamplight—can be equally off-putting in their own way. In such places I always find myself wondering how drafty the windows were, or when indoor bathrooms were installed. George Eliot was aware of the problems inherent in visiting and preserving the houses of the celebrated: “Stupidity of people tricking out and altering such a place instead of letting one see it as he saw it and lived in it,” she once wrote after visiting Schiller’s home, in Weimar.

Still, it’s better to be able to visit such sites than not to be able to, and on trips to Nuneaton to research a book I’m writing on George Eliot and “Middlemarch,” I’ve been grateful for the chance to poke around outside Griff’s outbuildings, and to think of the young George Eliot helping out in them—and, more significantly, imagining her way out of them, and into her extraordinary career. Seeing where she came from makes knowing where she ended up all the more impressive, and the more moving.

Eliot was always rather proud of her dairy skills: in 1871, when she was the best-known novelist in England and was in the middle of writing “Middlemarch,” she spent a few months living in the country in Surrey, where she surprised a local farmer’s wife with her knowledge of fruit growth and butter manufacture. She could always conjure the places of such labor with an acute sensual specificity. “The dairy was certainly worth looking at,” she wrote in “Adam Bede.” “It was a scene to sicken for with a sort of calenture in hot and dusty streets—such coolness, such purity, such fresh fragrance of new-pressed cheese, of firm butter, of wooden vessels perpetually bathed in pure water; such soft colouring of red earthenware and creamy surfaces, brown wood and polished tin, grey limestone and rich orange-red rust on the iron weights and hooks and hinges.” The dairy at Griff is still worth looking at, too, and worth saving.

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